With Ahab at the wheel
“What kind of disastrous path lies ahead of us if we do not have the chance to purge ourselves of that putrefaction rotting inside our body?” Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago
Over the past ten years I’ve written more words about Donald Trump than I have about any other subject, and while bearing witness to Trump’s madness is necessary, it also exacts a toll. Trump is stupid and cruel, emotionally stunted by his father, mentored by the infamous lawyer Roy Cohn, very likely a traitor to our country — time will prove this — and a menace to a world faced with catastrophic climate change, obscene wealth inequality and technological threats. If this humble page often seems sad or grim, it simply reflects the despair I feel as I witness the perversion of the American experiment.
The terrible fact that we brought this upon ourselves is paltry balm.
In 2016 I gave a pass to any one who voted for Trump. After 9/11, the financial meltdown of 2008-2010, the Wall Street bailouts, and ever-advancing wealth inequality, I could hardly blame someone for taking a chance on Trump, even though I knew he was nothing more than a ridiculous huckster, part of a long American tradition of charlatans and snake-oil salesmen. By 2016, both political parties had gang-banged the wage-earning class. Trump made outrageous promises, but in one respect he was true to his word — he was different from other politicians: overtly crude, bigoted, sexist and proud of his ignorance.
The Covid pandemic was my red line. Any partially-sentient person who experienced Trump’s incompetence during the pandemic, and continued to support him, earned my everlasting disdain. Throw in Trump’s Big Lie that he won the 2020 election, and the January 6 coup attempt, which should have spelled the end for Trump, and that disdain hardened, morphed into something akin to, you’re dead to me. In 2024, people not only voted for a convicted felon, they voted for an out-and-out moron, fully believing that he would end Russia’s war against Ukraine in a day, solve the Israel-Palestine conflict, and drastically lower the price of everything.
I watched as much of Trump’s insane speech to the United Nations General Assembly as I could tolerate; shame and embarrassment is what I felt. Trumpism and MAGA is a cancer gnawing away at our vital organs. Words fail. Despite being demonstrably batshit crazy, Trump retains the support of the GOP and the corporate media and the Billionaire Class, crypto scammers and sycophants and opportunistic shitbirds like Shady JD Vance, all insisting that the doddering, obese 80-year-old is fit as a fiddle, lucid, master of his domain. Natalie Harp whispers in Trump’s good ear, while Melania jabs needles into a Natalie Harp voodoo doll. Word on the street is that Melania has had several intense sessions with a Haitian witchdoctor. (I made this last part up, but you get my drift.) Stab away, First Lady.
If you know your American history you know this country was never great. But for a long time our founding principles, public education, colleges and universities, and movements for voting, labor and civil rights held out the promise that what was good about America could be made better. Striving for a more perfect union was a worthy if ultimately unattainable goal. Alas, it seems we’ve given up the struggle for the common good. After a decade of Donald Trump, our union is hanging by a thread, the thin remains of the last hawser from the Pequod, that doomed and damned vessel. Trump is Ahab: mad, monomaniacal, forever chasing after something to fill his vacant soul.
Let Herman Melville have the final word: “…then the rushing Pequod, freighted with savages, and laden with fire, and burning a corpse, and plunging into the blackness of darkness, seemed the material counterpart of her monomaniac commander’s soul.”
